December 02nd, 2016

Enjoy the lack of focus in your art, it is an essential part of the process

​The good news is that you have been getting into the studio and making work, at least some. You are trying to get your creative work moving again and you have decided to go ahead and do short, quick studies- what I would call doodles. The key is that they are low pressure things- throw away work, nothing serious- just a way to get the juices flowing. I will talk more about this process in another post.

The bad news is that when you walk away from it, your inner critic starts yelling about how stupid it is, and how scattered your ideas are, and how you have no discipline or direction and you are never going to amount to anything as an artist. Ouch. It is hard to keep going in the face of this!
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I don't know if it really helps to know this, but it is completely normal. I go through cycles of this as does every artist that I know. And it can be very painful.

As frustrating and painful as it is, what is going on here is really good stuff!

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1. You have an inner critic who has a very strong sense of engagement and desire to keep you from putting out schlock, junk, ill-conceived and poorly made stuff. Excellent! Yes- there is work to do to keep that inner critic from decimating the whole process. But fear not- it is possible (essential really) to get that voice to be helpful instead of harmful. I will address the befriending of this nasty mean bit of you in another post.

2. The scattered ideas- the jumping from one thing to another with no apparent discipline- no depth- this is a good sign and great activity! You are generating new creative ideas- they are spawning each other. The point is to let yourself play- watch and enjoy as the variety of ideas jump out of you. Do not edit now. There will be plenty of time for that later. Your job now is to allow and notice, to follow the impulse and engage what is compelling. All of these ideas are playing with each other and there will be a convergence and a distillation that will happen organically. Do not push it. Just pay attention to what is drawing you in and go there.

One of the main things is to Trust the process. What I mean by this is that your creative process, if it is really working well, is a messy, confusing, non-linear thing. "If you can see where you are going- you are not reaching far enough." (I'm sorry I do not know the name of the brilliant person who said this!) It is a good sign to be lost- it means that new stuff is emerging. It is a good thing to be frustrated with the lack of depth- it means that you are not comfortable in the surface, predigested ideas- you are reaching deeper.

Ok this is where I have to admit that I have a very strong bias. I believe that the value of art work is in its ability to express the stuff that is happening on a sub-conscious level before we have a conscious understanding of it. The human psyche is full of complexity and paradox, beauty and pain. By loving it in to awareness through the creative process, we are able to see our most challenging aspects with compassion, humor and openness- and in so doing we can heal and transform.

This is far bigger than the individual. We belong to a culture (or many cultures and sub-cultures)  and so all of what we as a culture are working through, (and there are some serious challenges there right now) we are also working through on an individual level. As artists we have an essential role to play in bringing loving awareness to our most challenging aspects. We are essential healers of our own culture. We must do the work with integrity, honesty and dogged vulnerability.

So Trust the Process- know that what is happening through all this discomfort is that you are tapping the depths and that by making the stuff you are bringing light to it. 

Do not try to understand what you are doing!!! This is big. You need to stay in the not knowing as long as possible. That is if you want the work to have depth and courage and insight. If you want your work to be valuable for you and for our culture, you need to allow it to come from a non-cognitive place. Your cognitive mind- your thinking brain- is a very busy and beautiful place. But it will stifle the good stuff because it wants to name and organize and clarify and justify. That is its job. And it is good- Just not yet. I will talk about how to engage the critical skills in another post. 

The point is that if you let that thinking brain name, organize, justify and clarify before the ideas have really finished stewing, you are going to produce something that only touches the surface, that does not have the complex and subtle aromas and surprising, tantalizing zing. It will be what we already think we know. 

So go back to the studio tomorrow morning and before your conscious brain has a chance to get in the way- push your chosen materials around and enjoy the way the colors relate to each other, the shapes and lines and textures and flow, enjoy the way one word leads to another, how the notes play in the new music, and notice the ideas that spin out of it. And in a few weeks or months look back at this moment and realize that the decisions of where to go from here took care of themselves and you are thick in the process.

Back to you!
I would love to read your thoughts on this one! Please comment. And if you know anyone who might be interested in this way of thinking, share share share!